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London Games Festival: The Future of AI in games

Just been to a talk at Imperial College London, put on as part of the London Games Festival, presenting viewpoints form the games industry (Peter Molyneux and someone from Eidos) and from AI Academia. Very accessible and interesting.

I’ve tried my best to do an Alice, but I’ve not quite got the knack – so far from verbatim notes below:

The future of AI in games
London Games Festival

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4.10.06

peter molyneux, prof. mark cavazza., dr. simon colton
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intro
john cass, icl

article in the economist from the summer (CF)

next challenge is to develop believable characters and intelligences in game worlds

bring together two communities: the game devlopers from industry and artificial intelligence research community from academia

take industry to a new level

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peter molyneux

this is the most interesting area of game design to him

sorry – on behalf of games industry for grabbing the term AI and totally abusing it.

we need a whole raft of REAL AI and we’re starting to get the processing power to do it. next gen consoles could be the key.

– agent AI: need for convincing characters, recognizing what you are doing as a player. we are doing so much more as players – more freedom, more emotion. fable2: friendship, family – relationships… how do this convincingly?

– cloning AI: online is here to stay and this creates big problems… what about having a clone of yourself to remain in a persistent world so you can stay ‘present’ when you should go to sleep (UK vs. australia)

– learning AI – adapting to players and play.

– balancing AI: we’ve failed because we are not mass market – we only appeal to a very small audience… biggest game = 20m should be 200m… one of the reasons we have not got the reach is that we have no way to balance the difficulty of the game – looking at how the player plays and balance the game play accordingly (cf. czymihalyi flow, robin hunicke’s work)

AI future – will change the way that games are designed, create new types of game, create unique experiences… my game experience will be different from yours. far more realistic worlds can be created… visually we are getting close, but need great AI to back this up otherwise they will feel flawed. i will be able to stand up in 5yrs time and say look at how games have changed due to AI.

– AI researchers think it’s about BEATING the player, whereas games industry want AIs to help engage the player further in the game world.

so, what else can we do

– data mining game-play data
— changing how the game plays
– affective computing (HCI)
— how to tell from a players face what their emotional response is and changing game-play
– automatic avatars (to step in your place for sleep and toilet breaks!)
– but could be most useful in the design stage

comparison to the biotech industry
is designing a game more difficult than designing a drug? maybe? do drug companies have more funds? more IP issues? maybe?
BUT – drug companies absolutely make more use of AI in their design process than the games industry…